It Never Ends

I'm starting to wish I hadn't taken Mrs R's National Adoption Month challenge. I think I'm all blogged out. What more can I possibly say about adoption than I've said already? And it's only the 8th. There are three weeks left in the month. I feel like I've been repeating myself a lot already, and I just don't have the emotional energy to finish my story yet.

I miss my Roo. I thought about her all day yesterday and I've been thinking about her all day today. I miss being her mommy. I miss holding her and kissing her chubby little cheeks and hearing her babble and coo and sigh. It's been two months since she was my baby, and they've been the longest two months of my life.

Here's what I hate about being a birth mother: it never ends. Placing Roo was twice as hard as my father's death and I know exactly why. His death was the end. He's gone, and that's that, and it's never going to change. Placing Roo was just the beginning. That journey is just beginning, and as she grows and changes, so will how I feel about her placement. There will never be a point where I can just forget that I had her and that I was her mommy. Every day for the rest of my life I will think, as I do now, that Roo was my baby once, and now she's not and never will be again.

I may marry someday, God willing, and have more children. But my past experience will color any future experiences. I will compare everything to how things were with Roo, and I will mourn. I will miss her. She won't miss me. She won't even really know me. Sometimes that all just feels like too much. I don't know if I can handle that. But what choice do I have? None. What's done is done and there's no going back.

I hate this downside that I'm dealing with, one that I never considered when mulling over the factors that went into my decision. I had it in my head that placement was an ending, a termination, a deadline. Once the 9th was over, that was it, and I would be ... oh, not over it certainly, not in a million years, but that things would be in a sense over. But they're not over by a long shot. They are just beginning, and I hate that.

I hate that my c-section scar still hurts sometimes, that my stomach is numb near the incision still, and that I don't have anything to show for it. I have pregnancy pounds without a baby as a reward. I hate it! I hate that she's not my baby anymore. I miss her so much! Most of the time anymore I can miss her and live with it, but other times, like right now, I'll sit on the couch and it will hit me forcefully that I once sat on this couch with Roo in my arms, holding her while she slept, that she was my baby then but she isn't now and never will be again.

I'm so sick of the pain. I wish it would go away for a while. I'm afraid it never will, and I don't know what to do with that fact.